The Real-Life School of Decorating

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Amanda Dameron, the editor in chief of Dwell magazine, lives in an apartment in a 1901 brownstone in Park Slope. “I love the architecture,” she said of her home. “It’s calming, moving and evocative of a lot of people’s romantic visions of Brooklyn.”

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By Dan Shaw

Oct. 10, 2014

Amanda Dameron could easily be a design snob, but her approach to decorating is as practical as it is discerning.

Although she’s the editor in chief of Dwell, the 14-year-old shelter magazine whose tagline is “At Home in the Modern World,” she does not live surrounded with furniture and accessories found only in the Museum of Modern Art’s architecture and design collection or the Design Within Reach catalog.

“I don’t have the kind of lifestyle that can support that type of object worship,” said Ms. Dameron, sitting on Kaare Klint’s 1933 Safari Chair in the living room of her floor-through apartment in a 1901 brownstone in the heart of Park Slope, Brooklyn.

“The way I approach everything is that it has to have utility,” she said. “It can’t be art for art’s sake.”

Ms. Dameron, 37, has other parameters. Everything in her home seems to have a pedigree, a story or sentimental value. She enthusiastically explains that she bought her vintage leather sofa online from Chairish. “It came from an estate in Atlanta, and it’s been well-used and well-loved,” she said. “It’s reminiscent of the work of a designer named Percival Lafer who was working in Brazil in the 1970s. I can’t afford a Percival Lafer sofa, but this one is kind of like a cousin — Brazilian modern meets a tufted Chesterfield.”

She also chose it because the arms have rounded corners. That way her 10-month-old son, Otto, can’t get poked. And because it’s well broken in, she doesn’t worry that he will ruin it. “I have to have a home that is not too precious, with a son and two dogs,” she said.

Ms. Dameron and her husband, Keven Matsuzaka, 34, a one-time sushi chef who is now a stay-at-home dad, moved recently from a one-bedroom apartment in Windsor Terrace to their two-bedroom walk-up because they wanted Otto to have his own room.

“That was paramount,” she said, adding that good light was a requirement and the washer/dryer and bathtub were an added bonus. “His room is just big enough for a crib and a changing table, but I love that he has a window that looks out on treetops.”

In front of a window framed by the original interior wood shutters, Ms. Dameron hung a glass sculpture called “Morning in Athens,” a 1953 design by the Finnish designer Kaj Franck. The clear handblown orbs make a gentle musical sound when you blow on them that is said to reverberate like the church bells of Athens. “I got it at the Iittala factory and lugged it back on the airplane,” she said.

Among the few other modernist elements in her apartment are the sleek Vitsoe 606 library-style bookshelves designed by Dieter Rams of Germany in 1960. “I’ve long coveted them and I finally had the space,” she said. “As a serious collector of books and magazines, bookshelves are very important to me.”

Ms. Dameron worked from 2001 to 2005 at Architectural Digest, and she has filled several shelves with issues from the 1970s and 1980s. “I refer to them all the time,” she said. “They are a great record of an important era.”

The bookshelves are punctuated with things that remind her and Mr. Matsuzaka (who is half Japanese) of their childhoods in Cincinnati, such as wooden kokeshi dolls that belonged to his paternal grandmother and the Kodak Brownie Fun Saver movie camera that belonged to his maternal grandfather, who was an engineer with Kodak. “We have a lot of objects from our grandparents because we are very close to them and we don’t have any family in New York, so they’re important for Otto and ourselves.”

There is also a traditional Uncle Sam mechanical bank that belonged to Ms. Dameron’s father. “When you put a penny in his hand it drops immediately into the U.S. bag and his chin starts wagging,” she said. “I’ve had that everywhere I’ve ever lived. We put it in our history and philosophy section.”

On a lower shelf, a copy of the children’s book “The Snowy Day” by Ezra Jack Keats is displayed on an easel like a work of art. “I love the graphics,” she said. “It was one of my favorite books growing up, and seeing it always takes me back to my childhood.”

Before moving to New York, Ms. Dameron lived in other hot neighborhoods — Silverlake in Los Angeles and the Mission in San Francisco — and she’s besotted with Park Slope.

“I don’t want to live anywhere else,” she said. “I love how in a block I can walk to get my shoes fixed, go to a hardware store, get an orange or have a painting framed. And they are all independent businesses, although Starbucks is encroaching. It makes me feel good to support the local economy.”

While she describes the neighborhood’s tree-lined streets and huge brownstones as “calming, moving and evocative of a lot of people’s romantic visions of Brooklyn,” her work life is focused on innovative, contemporary architecture and design. This past week her concern was the Dwell on Design NY conference in SoHo, with a schedule including a discussion on the intersection of design with loss.

Ms. Dameron was to be the moderator of that conversation, between Barry Svigals, the architect of the new Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and Mark Wagner of Davis Brody Bond, the lead architects of the National September 11 Memorial Museum. “It’s hard to create a monument to tragedy, remembrance and progression,” she said.

As for residential design, Ms. Dameron thinks honesty is the best policy. She stresses that Dwell strives for verisimilitude by never styling the homes it photographs. “We tell the people not to spend $1,000 on flowers and not make it look like they don’t live there,” she said. “We tell them to make it look like they’re having a good friend over for dinner. That’s what I did before you came over.” And that explains why she left Otto’s playpen set up in the middle of her living room.

Ms. Dameron does not believe in decorating to impress. “Your home has to be a refuge, the place you come back to after the world has done all the things it has done to you, where you can be truly yourself, power out — refuel,” she said. “This apartment is about my family. It feels good every time I walk in the door.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page RE4 of the New York edition with the headline: The Real-Life School of Decorating. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe